THE ART OF JAKE ATTREE IN DREAM CATCHER MAGAZINE, EXTRAPOLATED BY GREG MCGEE

An aspect of contemporary painting that continues to puzzle the casual onlooker is subject matter. Sunrises, galloping horses, sheer mountaintops are all, for a variety of reasons, established and preferred themes for many people. It is the message that carries the kernel of truth, the content that imparts the meaning, rather than relatively slippery notions of medium. Painters such as York born artist Jake Attree, however, have begged to differ for decades.

With an increasing yearning to harness his view of the world via application and observation rather than simple composition, Jake pushes paint around with the chutzpah of the showman and the acuity of the poet. There’s a reverence for the subject matter, to be sure, but it is the rococo of the application which primarily arrests, creating a concrete visual space that is all the richer for its heft. There are scumbled dry marks, succulent slabs, crenulated and fossilised attacks, and leathery, wriggling streaks, all serving not only to petrify the subject, whether its a street or a building or a row of trees, but also inviting the viewer to physically participate in contemplating its depiction. There are lyrical similarities with poetry here.

Perennial favourite Seamus Heaney described a poem as a “setting apart of language – making a ‘thing’ of it and housing it differently”. Jake sees before the rest of us the potential of this concrete presence, not only in the things itself, but in the art which skewers it. British poet Ruth Padel would perhaps call it the “the texture of the now”, a vitally rich invitation from the artist to not only step into the materiality of the painting, but to dwell in it.

Poet Emily Dickinson considered poetry to be as rich as a painting and richer than prose:

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

It is this opportunity to explore the painting that perhaps provides the building block of genius in Attree’s output. Depicting a street scene with all of its bustle and noise is one thing: to inculcate in the same subject matter a unique inner life, at once familiar and completely new, via the kind of mark making that has ensured painting has remained a vitally relevant medium, is the litmus test of a true artist.

Greg McGee is Art Advisor for international poetry magazine Dream Catcher

For more Jake Attree, check: https://www.jakeattree.co.uk/

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